amiga-news.de - Website application: The virtual Hippoplayer

25.Mar.2023 Website application: The virtual Hippoplayer
It all started at the end of 2009, when Spot created aSCIIaRENa as a website for the ASCII scene, which underwent a complete relaunch in 2021 with the help of 'Burps', 'Nicomen', 'Phantasm' and 'Ziphoid'.
Later came other ideas, they wanted to clone the number one ASCII tool, CygnusED, as CED for the web as a way to co-op on ASCII collys similar to how google docs works, but in a CED environment, Fred and Phiwer was brought into the team to write CED. It is available in alpha state now.

When making ASCII you need to listen to Amiga music of course, a prototype clone of Hippoplayer (HiP) was written by Stalvik, but it got scrapped early on.

In a next step of this exciting journey of the project, TAWS developer Michael Rupp was asked to use his Amiga Workbench simulation for browsers for the project. At that time HippoPlayer used the Bassoon tracker's playback routine as backend, work-in-progress was the conversion to a better backend by Jürgen Wothke based on UADE, which supports a variety of Amiga formats (some of them very exotic) due to the Paula emulation included in it. The graphical user interface was already very close to the original HiP 68k, the behavior of the windows was still quite rudimentary compared to TAWS.

It soon became apparent that it was more expedient to not only use Michael Rupp's assistance, but to completely hand over the implementation in TAWS to him, since the GUI was completely rewritten based on his TAWS classes.

Parallel to this it happened that K-P Koljonen had resumed the further development of HippoPlayer for Amiga in 2021 (amiga-news.de reported) and it was agreed that their webclone should become official with K-P Koljonen’s blessing.

In close cooperation between the author of the mod player and Michael Rupp, the original GUI was studied and rebuilt down to the smallest detail for the web implementation. Care was taken to ensure that the two HippoPlayers are compatible, i.e. that playlists can be exchanged. No matter which version created the playlist, the other one can read it. Thanks to the UHC tools by Patrik Axelsson and David Eriksson, HiP can now access Internet sources directly. The UHC server and its search API is also used for searching in HiP-TAWS. This makes compatible playlists possible, because if local files on the Amiga hard disk were referenced, this would not be possible otherwise.

In this context, one of the new features is the published playlists, which can be found in the "Playlists" folder. Through the Amiga remix search it should then also be possible to play MP3s, but the existing backend was only for the various tracker formats, but not for normal audio files like MP3, WAV, etc.. So Michael Rupp developed this himself. Now it is possible to play all formats including all audio files via this one player class. When HiP finally supported internet radio streaming, a streaming backend was added.

The scopes (graphical representation of what was heard) were also quite elaborate. In addition to the original HippoScope, RuppScope was created as a separate scope option by reverse-engineering.

The site was first published at workbench.asciiarena.se/, and the other existing projects were integrated as iFrame applications by the "aSCIIaRENa" people: AmIRC, NComm and the demos under Work:Demos. AmIRC and NComm is in early alpha stage and their names will probably be changed later on.

The IBrowse implementation was done by Michael Rupp himself and is intended as a homage to the Amiga browser, which its author, Oliver Roberts, took good note of when we pointed it out. In contrast to the original, the online version of course only handles a fraction. aSCIIaRENA can still be reached through https://www.asciiarena.se if you prefer that instead of viewing it in the iBrowse clone at https://www.hippoplayer.se.

When HippoPlayer became more and more central, the alias address hippoplayer.se/ was added. The UADE backend alone already supports about 300 formats, as Wothke had developed (and continues to develop) more backends, and made them available as open source. So more were integrated, whereby currently about 500 formats are supported. More will follow. (dr)

[News message: 25. Mar. 2023, 06:40] [Comments: 0]
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